Located on Maharashtra’s coast, Mumbai is India’s most-populous city, and it is one of the largest and most densely populated urban areas in the world. It was built on a site of ancient settlement, and it took its name from the local goddess Mumba—a form of Parvati, the consort of Shiva, one of the principal deities of Hinduism—whose temple once stood in what is now the southeastern section of the city. It became known as Bombay during the British colonial period, the name possibly an Anglicized corruption of Mumbai or perhaps of Bom Baim (“Good Harbour”), supposedly a Portuguese name for the locale. The name Mumbai was restored officially in 1995, although Bombay remained in common usage.

Mumbai, long the centre of India’s cotton textile industry, subsequently developed a highly diversified manufacturing sector that included an increasingly important information technology (IT) component. In addition, the city’s commercial and financial institutions are strong and vigorous, and Mumbai serves as the country’s financial hub. It suffers, however, from some of the perennial problems of many large expanding industrial cities: air and water pollution, widespread areas of substandard housing, and overcrowding. The last problem is exacerbated by the physical limits of the city’s island location. Area about 239 square miles (619 square km). Pop. (2001) 11,978,450; urban agglom., 16,434,386; (2011) 12,478,447; urban agglom., 18,414,288.

Dhobi Ghat, an outdoor laundromat in Mumbai (Bombay), India.

Dennis Jarvis (CC-BY-2.0) (A Britannica Publishing Partner)

Landscape

City site

The city of Mumbai occupies a peninsular site on Bombay Island, a landmass originally composed of seven islets lying off the Konkan coast of western India. Since the 17th century the islets have been joined through drainage and reclamation projects, as well as through the construction of causeways and breakwaters, to form Bombay Island. East of the island are the sheltered waters of Mumbai (Bombay) Harbour. Bombay Island consists of a low-lying plain, about one-fourth of which lies below sea level; the plain is flanked on the east and west by two parallel ridges of low hills. Colaba Point, the headland formed on the extreme south by the longer of those ridges, protects Mumbai Harbour from the open sea.

The western ridge terminates at Malabar Hill, which, rising 180 feet (55 metres) above sea level, is one of the highest points in Mumbai. Between Colaba Point and Malabar Hill lies the shallow expanse of Back Bay. On a slightly raised strip of land between the head of Back Bay and the harbour is an area called the Fort, the site of the 17th-century British fortifications (little of which remains standing) within and around which the city grew; the area is now occupied chiefly by public and commercial offices. From Back Bay the land stretches northward to the central plain. The extreme northern segment of Mumbai is occupied by a large salt marsh.

The old city covered about 26 square miles (67 square km), stretching from Colaba Point on the southern tip of Bombay Island to the areas known as Mahim and Sion on its northern coast. In 1950 Mumbai expanded northward, embracing the large island of Salsette, which was joined to Bombay Island by a causeway. By 1957 a number of suburban municipal boroughs and some neighbouring villages on Salsette were incorporated into Greater Mumbai—the metropolitan region surrounding Bombay Island and the city itself. Since then Greater Mumbai has continued to expand.

The natural beauty of Mumbai is unsurpassed by that of most other cities in the region. The entrance into Mumbai Harbour from the sea discloses a magnificent panorama framed by the Western Ghats mountain range on the mainland. The wide harbour, studded with islands and dotted with the white sails of innumerable small craft, affords secure shelter to ships, particularly when storms lash the coast. The largest of the harbour’s islands is Elephanta, which is famous for its 8th- and 9th-century Hindu cave temples.

Typical trees in the city include coconut palms, mango trees, tamarinds, and banyan trees. Salsette Island was once the haunt of wild animals such as tigers, leopards, jackals, and deer, but those are no longer found there. Animal life now consists of cows, oxen, sheep, goats, and other domestic species, as well as monkeys. Birdlife includes vultures, pigeons, peacocks, cranes, and ducks.

Climate

The climate of Mumbai is warm and humid. There are four seasons. Cool weather prevails from December to February and hot weather from March to May. The rainy season, brought by monsoon winds from the southwest, lasts from June to September and is followed by the post-monsoon season, lasting through October and November, when the weather is again hot. Mean monthly temperatures vary from 91 °F (33 °C) in May to 67 °F (19 °C) in January. Annual rainfall is about 70 inches (1,800 mm), with an average of 24 inches (600 mm) occurring in July alone.

City layout

The older part of Mumbai is much built-up and devoid of vegetation, but the more affluent areas, such as Malabar Hill, contain some greenery; there are a number of open playgrounds and parks. In the course of urban expansion, some residential sections of Mumbai have fallen into a state of serious disrepair, while in other areas clusters of makeshift houses (often illegal “squatter” settlements) have arisen to accommodate the city’s expanding population. Moreover, an alarming amount of air and water pollution has been generated by Mumbai’s many factories, by the growing volume of vehicular traffic, and by nearby oil refineries.

The financial district is located in the southern part of the city, in the Fort area. Farther south (around Colaba) and to the west along the Back Bay coast and on Malabar Hill are residential neighbourhoods. To the north of the Fort is the principal business district, which gradually merges into a commercial-residential area. Most of the older factories are located in that part of the city. Still farther north are more residential areas, and beyond them are newer industrial zones as well as some squatter districts and other areas of overcrowded and poorly maintained housing.

Street scene in southern Mumbai, Maharashtra, India.

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Housing is largely privately owned, though there is some public housing built by the government through publicly funded corporations or by private cooperatives with public funds. Mumbai is extremely crowded, and housing is scarce for anyone who is not wealthy. (For that reason, commercial and industrial enterprises have found it increasingly difficult to attract mid-level professional, technical, or managerial staff.) In an attempt to stem the ongoing immigration of unskilled labour that has increased the city’s indigent and homeless population, city planners have encouraged enterprises to locate across Mumbai Harbour—notably in Navi (“New”) Mumbai—and have banned the development and expansion of industrial units inside the city; their efforts, however, have been largely unsuccessful.

Mumbai’s architecture is a mixture of florid Gothic Revival styles—characteristic of the United States and Britain in the 18th and 19th centuries—and contemporary designs. Many residential and commercial buildings constructed in the Gothic Victorian style during the period of British rule still stand today—most notably the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus (formerly Victoria Terminus), the city’s main train station and headquarters of India’s Central Railway company. The older administrative and commercial buildings are intermingled with skyscrapers and multistoried concrete-block buildings.

Mumbai’s growth since the 1940s has been steady if not phenomenal. At the turn of the 20th century its population was some 850,000, by 1950 it had more than doubled, and over the next 50 years it increased nearly 10-fold to exceed 16 million. Population growth continued into the 21st century. The city’s birth rate is much lower than that of the country as a whole because of family-planning programs. The high overall growth rate is largely attributable to the influx of people in search of employment. Because of the limited physical expanse of the city, the growth in Mumbai’s population has been accompanied by an astounding increase in population density. By the early 21st century the city had reached an average of some 77,000 persons per square mile (29,500 per square km). Settlement is especially dense in much of the city’s older section; the wealthy areas near Back Bay are less heavily populated.

Economy

Mumbai is the economic hub and commercial and financial centre of India. Its economic composition in some respects mirrors India’s unique mosaic of prosperity and technological achievement vis-à-vis impoverishment and underdevelopment. While Mumbai contains the Indian Atomic Energy Commission’s establishment, with its nuclear reactors and plutonium separators, many areas on the outskirts of the city continue to rely on traditional biogenic sources of fuel and energy (such as cow dung).

Manufacturing and technology

Although cotton textile manufacturing, through which Mumbai prospered in the 19th century, remains important to the city’s economy, it has lost much ground to newer industries, especially since the late 20th century. Production of metals, chemicals, automobiles, and electronics along with a host of ancillary industries are now among the city’s major enterprises. Other manufacturing activities, such as food processing, papermaking, printing, and publishing, also are significant sources of income and employment.

After years of lagging behind cities such as Bengaluru (Bangalore) and Hyderabad, Mumbai began developing its own information technology (IT) sector in the late 20th century. Technology companies were encouraged to move especially to the northern and eastern suburbs, drawn there by improvements in infrastructure and low rents. Of note are a special economic zone set up in the northern part of the city in 2000 and facilities for IT companies in Navi Mumbai.

Finance and other services

The Reserve Bank of India, the country’s central bank, is located in Mumbai. A number of other commercial banks, a government-owned life insurance corporation, and various long-term investment financial institutions also are based in the city. All of those institutions have attracted major financial and business services to Mumbai.

Bombay Stock Exchange, Mumbai, India.

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The Bombay Stock Exchange is the country’s leading stock and share market. Although a number of economic hubs sprang up around the country since independence and reduced the exchange’s pre-independence stature, it remains the preeminent centre in volume of financial and other business transacted and serves as a barometer of the country’s economy.

Transportation

Mumbai is connected by a network of roads to the rest of India. It is the railhead for the Western and Central railways, and trains from the city carry goods and passengers to all parts of the country.

During the early 1970s, in an effort to relieve road congestion, Salsette Island was linked to the mainland by a bridge across Thana Creek, the headwaters of Mumbai Harbour. More express highways and more bridges have been built since then. Notable additions to the road network are the Banda-Worli Sea Link (opened 2009), which bridges Mahim Bay on the west side of the city, and a new expressway between eastern Mumbai and Navi Mumbai (opened 2014) that supersedes the earlier Thana Creek bridge.

Air traffic is handled by Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport in the northern part of the city. It consists of two terminals—domestic and international—which are about 3 miles (5 km) apart on either side of the runway system. A new international terminal opened in 2014, replacing an older facility. Mumbai is one of two principal air hubs in India—the other being Delhi—and handles most of the country’s international flights and a large proportion of its domestic service.

The facilities provided by the city’s harbour make Mumbai India’s principal western port. Although other major ports have sprung up on the west coast—Kandla, in the state of Gujarat, to the north; Marmagao, in the state of Goa, to the south; and Kochi (Cochin), in the state of Kerala, farther south—Mumbai still handles a significant portion of India’s maritime trade. The original port on the east side of Bombay Island was supplemented in 1989 by the opening of a large facility in Navi Bombay that handles containers and bulk liquid cargoes.

Suburban electric train systems provide the main public transportation, conveying hundreds of thousands of commuters within the metropolitan region daily. There are also thousands of taxis and auto-rickshaws fueled by liquid petroleum gas, which are identifiable by their iconic black-and-yellow painted bodies. In addition, a municipally owned bus fleet operates throughout the inner city and in parts of Navi Mumbai and Thane. Those services have been supplemented by a rapid-transit train system, the first line of which opened in 2014. The first portion of a monorail line in the city also began operating in 2014.

Administration and society

Government

As the capital of Maharashtra state, the city is an integral political division of the state government, the headquarters of which are called the Mantralaya. The state administers Mumbai’s police force and has administrative control over certain city departments. The central Indian government controls communication and transportation infrastructure, including the postal service, the railways, the port, and the airport. Mumbai is the headquarters of India’s western naval fleet and the base for the Indian flagship, INS Mumbai.

The government of the city is vested in the fully autonomousMunicipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai (MCGM). Its legislative body is elected on adult franchise every four years and functions through its various standing committees. The chief executive, who is appointed every three years by the state government, is the municipal commissioner. The mayor is annually elected by the MCGM; the mayor presides over corporation meetings and enjoys the highest honour in the city but has no real administrative authority.

Municipal services

The manifold functions of the city government include the provision or maintenance of medical services, education, water supply, fire services, garbage disposal, markets, gardens, and engineering projects such as drainage development and the improvement of roads and street lighting. The MCGM operates the transport system inside the city and the supply of electricity as public utilities. After obtaining electric energy from a grid system supplied by publicly and privately owned agencies, the MCGM ensures that it is distributed throughout the city. The water supply, also maintained by the municipality, comes largely from Tansa Lake, in the adjoining Thane district of Maharashtra, and secondarily from the Vaitarna River and from Tulsi and Vehar lakes in Mumbai.

Health

Mumbai has more than 100 hospitals, including those run by federal, state, or city authorities and a number of specialized institutions treating tuberculosis, cancer, and heart disease. In addition, there are a number of prominent private hospitals. Also located in Mumbai is the Haffkine Institute, a leading bacteriologic research centre specializing in tropical diseases.

Education

Mumbai’s literacy rate is much higher than that of the country as a whole. Primary education is free and compulsory; it is the responsibility of the MCGM. Secondary education is provided largely by public schools that are supervised by the state government, as well as by several independently run private schools for students whose families can afford them. There also are public and private polytechnic institutes and institutions offering students a variety of degree and diploma courses in mechanical, electrical, and chemical engineering. The Indian Institute of Technology, operated by the central government, is located in the city. The University of Mumbai, established in 1857, has more than 100 constituent colleges and more than two dozen teaching departments. Several colleges in the state of Goa are affiliated with the university.

Rajabai Clock Tower at the University of Mumbai, Mumbai, Maharashtra, India.

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Cultural life

Mumbai’s cultural life reflects its ethnically diverse population. The city has a number of museums, libraries, literary organizations, art galleries, theatres, and other cultural institutions. The Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya (formerly the Prince of Wales Museum of Western India), housed in a building that is a British architectural mixture of Hindu and Muslim styles, contains three main sections: art, archaeology, and natural history. Nearby is the Jehangir Art Gallery, Mumbai’s first permanent art gallery and a centre for cultural and educational activities. Western and Indian music concerts, festivals, and dance productions are held throughout the year in the city’s many cultural and entertainment facilities. Mumbai also is the centre of the enormous Indian film industry, known as Bollywood, the name derived from an amalgamation of Bombay (the city’s former name) and Hollywood.

Statue of the Buddha at the entrance of the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya …

Elroy Serrao

The Fort area is home to two of Mumbai’s most-renowned landmarks. The first, Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, opened in the late 1880s after a decade of construction. It was designed by the British architectural engineer F.W. Stevens and built in the Victorian Gothic Revival style in a manner that recalled a traditional Indian palace. The terminal was designated a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2004. The second structure, the Gateway of India, was dedicated in 1924, built to commemorate the visit of King George V and Queen Mary to the city. It overlooks Mumbai Harbour and consists of a large arch with a central dome, which is supported by four intricately decorated turrets. Both buildings are popular attractions for local and foreign tourists.

Gateway of India, on Mumbai Harbour, southern Mumbai, India.

Rhaessner

Krishnagiri Forest, a national park in the northern part of metropolitan Mumbai, is a pleasant vacation resort located near the Kanheri Caves; the caves, numbering more than 100, were the site of an ancient Buddhist university and contain gigantic Buddhist sculptures dating from the 2nd to the 9th century bce. There are several public gardens, including the Jijamata Udyan, which houses Mumbai’s zoo in the city proper; the Baptista Garden, located on a water reservoir, also in the centre of the city; and the Pherozeshah Mehta Gardens (popularly called “Hanging Gardens”) and the Kamala Nehru Park, both on Malabar Hill. The cave temples on Elephanta Island were designated a World Heritage site in 1987.

Stone carvings, depicting the marriage of Shiva and Parvati, in a cave temple on Elephanta Island …

naveen0301—iStock/Thinkstock

Sports enjoy a broad following in Mumbai. Cricket matches, which are popular throughout India, are played at Wankhede Stadium and Brabourne Stadium, the latter of which is the headquarters and main pitch of the Cricket Club of India. Football (soccer) is also highly popular in Mumbai, and matches are played at Cooperage Football Ground in the Fort area. Athletic and cycling track events attract many enthusiasts. Juhu and Chowpatty beaches are popular areas for bathing and swimming.

Mumbai is an important centre for the Indian printing industry and has a vigorous press. Daily newspapers are printed in English, Marathi, Hindi, Gujarati, Urdu, and other languages. Several monthlies, biweeklies, and weeklies also are published in the city. The regional station of All-India Radio is centred in Mumbai. Television services for the city began in 1972.

History

The Koli, an aboriginal tribe of fishermen, were the earliest known inhabitants of present-day Mumbai, though Paleolithic stone implements found at Kandivli, in Greater Mumbai, indicate that the area has been inhabited by humans for hundreds of thousands of years. The city was a centre of maritime trade with Persia and Egypt in 1000 bce. It was part of Ashoka’s empire in the 3rd century bce, and in the 2nd century ce it was known as Heptanesia to Ptolemy, the ancient Egyptian astronomer and geographer of Greek descent.

Video overview of Mumbai’s history.

Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

The city was ruled in the 6th–8th century by the Chalukyas, who left their mark on Elephanta Island (Gharapuri). The Walkeswar Temple at Malabar Point was probably built during the rule of Shilahara chiefs from the Konkan coast (9th–13th century). Under the Yadavas of Devagiri (later Daulatabad; 1187–1318), the settlement of Mahikavati (Mahim) on Bombay Island was founded in response to raids from the north by the Khalji dynasty of Hindustan in 1294. Descendants of the Yadavas are found in contemporary Mumbai, and most of the place-names on the island date from that era.

In 1348 the island was conquered by invading Muslim forces and became part of the kingdom of Gujarat. A Portuguese attempt to conquer Mahim failed in 1507, but in 1534 Sultan Bahādur Shah, the ruler of Gujarat, ceded the island to the Portuguese. In 1661 it came under British control as part of the marriage settlement between King Charles II and Catherine of Braganza, sister of the king of Portugal. The crown ceded it to the East India Company in 1668.

At first, compared with Calcutta (now Kolkata) and Madras (now Chennai), Bombay—as it was called by the British—was not a great asset to the company but merely helped it keep a toehold on the west coast. On the mainland the Mughals in the north, the Marathas (under the venerated leader Chhatrapati Shivaji) in the area surrounding and stretching eastward from Bombay, and the territorial princes in Gujarat to the northwest were more powerful. Even British naval power was no match for the Mughals, Marathas, Portuguese, and Dutch, all of whom had interests in the region. By the turn of the 19th century, however, external events helped stimulate the growth of the city. The decay of Mughal power in Delhi, the Mughal-Maratha rivalries, and the instability in Gujarat drove artisans and merchants to the islands for refuge, and Bombay began to grow. With the destruction of Maratha power, trade and communications to the mainland were established, existing connections to Europe were extended, and Bombay began to prosper.

Port of Bombay, 18th-century engraving.

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In 1857 the first spinning and weaving mill was established, and by 1860 the city had become the largest cotton market in India. The American Civil War (1861–65) and the resulting cutoff of cotton supplies to Britain caused a great trade boom in Bombay. But, with the end of the Civil War, cotton prices crashed and the bubble burst. By that time, though, the hinterland had been opened, and Bombay had become a strong centre of import trade. The opening in 1869 of the Suez Canal, which greatly facilitated trade with Britain and continental Europe, also contributed to Bombay’s prosperity.

Yet, as the population increased, unkempt, overcrowded, and unsanitary conditions became more widespread. Plague, for example, broke out in 1896. In response to those problems, the City Improvement Trust was established to open new localities for settlement and to erect dwellings for the artisan classes. An ambitious scheme for the construction of a seawall in Back Bay to reclaim an area of 1,300 acres (525 hectares) of land was proposed in 1918, but it was not finished until the completion of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose Road (Marine Drive) from Nariman Point to Malabar Point—the first two-way highway of its kind in India—after World War II (1939–45). In the postwar years the development of residential quarters in suburban areas was begun, and the administration of Bombay city through a municipal corporation was extended to the suburbs of Greater Bombay.

Map of Bombay (Mumbai), c. 1900, from the 10th edition of Encyclopædia …

Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

Under the British, the city had served as the capital of Bombay Presidency (administrative province), and during the late 19th and early 20th centuries it was a centre of both Indian nationalist and South Asian regional political activity. In 1885 the first session of the Indian National Congress (Congress Party; a focus of both pro-Indian and anti-British sentiment until independence) was held in the city, where subsequently, at its 1942 session, the Congress Party passed the “Quit India” resolution, which demanded complete independence for India. Although that initiative was crushed by the British, India did achieve independence in 1947.

From 1956 until 1960 Bombay was the scene of intense Maratha protests against the two-language (Marathi-Gujarati) makeup of Bombay state (of which Bombay remained the capital), a legacy of British imperialism. Those protests led to the state’s partition into the modern states of Gujarat and Maharashtra in 1960, and Bombay was made the capital of Maharashtra that year.

The destruction of the Babri Masjid (“Mosque of Bābur”) in Ayodhya in December 1992 sparked sectarian rioting in Bombay and throughout India that lasted into early 1993 and caused the deaths of hundreds of people. A few years later the city changed its name to Mumbai, the Marathi name for the city. In the early 21st century Mumbai experienced a number of terrorist attacks. Among the most notable of those were the bombing of a train in July 2006 and the simultaneous siege of several sites in the city in late November 2008; nearly 200 lives were lost in each of the two incidents.

Targets of the November 2008 terrorist attack in Mumbai, India.

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Mumbai continued to grow and prosper in the 21st century, in large part because of advances in the technology sector. By the second decade of the century the population of Greater Mumbai was approaching 20 million. The city’s infrastructure was improved considerably with the construction of new highways and bridges, expansion of port facilities, and the inauguration of new public-transit systems. Overcrowding, traffic congestion, environmental pollution, and widespread poverty, however, remained major ongoing problems.

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Mumbai is the largest city in India, a country in southern Asia. The city was once called Bombay. It is one of the most populated cities in the world. Its millions of people are crowded onto an island in the Arabian Sea. Bridges connect the city to the nearby mainland of India. Mumbai Island was once seven separate islands, but engineers made them into one island.

The largest city in India is Mumbai, the capital of the state of Maharashtra. Crowded, bustling, and dynamic, it is the heart of the country’s financial and commercial sectors and an important center of culture and education. The city was called Bombay until 1995. In that year it was officially renamed Mumbai, its name in the Marathi language. A major port, the city has long been referred to as "the Gateway of India." In fact, a large ceremonial gateway was erected there in 1911 to commemorate the first visit made to India by a British king and queen. Through this gateway the last British viceroy departed in 1947, marking the termination of almost 350 years of official British presence in India.